Chasing Shadows: Memoirs of a Sixties Survivor

Fred Wilcox

Jun 2014 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

CHASING SHADOWS tells the story of a young man who pays a heavy price for pursuing his own dream. When he announces that he intends to be a poet instead of a doctor, his working class family thinks he’s gone crazy. They send him to psychiatrists who shoot electricity though his brain, warn him that he’ll never hold a job, and confide that he will suffer from nervous breakdowns all his life. After a stint in a state mental hospital, he spends the ‘60's on the mean streets of New York City, not as a fair-weather hippie with a room of his own in Scarsdale whenever he tires of the hard life, but as a fugitive from everyone, and everything, he once loved.

About the author

Fred Wilcox was born in Des Moines, Iowa. An honors graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, he holds a Doctor of Arts degree from the State University of New York at Albany. His pervious books include Grass Roots: An Anti-Nuclear Source Book, Waiting For An Army To Die: The Tragedy of Agent Orange, and Uncommon Martyrs: How the Berrigans & Friends Are Turning Swords Into Plowshares. He has worked as a truck driver, day laborer, busboy, dishwasher, housecleaner, carpenter’s helper on high-rise construction, bartender, and more. He currently teaches full-time in the Writing Program at Ithaca College.